BloggingRef's officiating blog. Contains a journal of his basketball season, as well as his views on general officiating topics as they arise.
Updated frequently during the HS basketball season, sporadically outside of it.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Cancellations galore...

and I'm at 2 weeks without a game as of tonight. Nothing slated until a week from today, either. The first week was by design (medical absence). The second week we were pulverized by weather. And next week is light because of the holiday.

In other news, I've gotten my first set of peer evaluations back, and I continue to passionately dislike peer evaluation. I hate doing them, and I hate receiving them. They've put in all of the numbers, and my partners have given me a score that I can't interpret the meaning of. Geez. Speaking as an educator, I hate it when people give assessments that don't mean anything and can't be used to improve.

Some feedback indicates that I need to stand up straighter and tighter mechanics. Guilty as charged. The same guy wrote that he'd work with me at any level, so that makes me feel good even if the score was a shade low. Someone else wrote that I "appeared lost on dead balls." Maybe that was one of the days that I was struggling back and forth between 2- and 3-man mechanics...maybe it was one of the most recent games where I was really sleepy, or maybe he's just full of it. Another guy said I "never moved as Lead." Maybe I had an off night, or maybe the defense was in a zone and moving was superfluous, or maybe he's just full of it. (And, on top of this, I don't remember any partners asking me at halftime or at a dead ball to move more as lead. For them not to tell me during the game but to ding me severely on an evaluation for it is flat-out crap.)

The point is that I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TAKE THESE EVALUATIONS WITHOUT KNOWING THE GAME THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.

As such, they're useless to me. Neither I nor anybody else can get better through this assessment method. Plus, during a game, I'm concentrating more on the game than on how I'll evaluate my partners. And on top of that, knowing you'll be evaluated in every game by every partner is NOT good for us. It means we might be too quick to cave in to partners' ideas rather than fight for what is right.

Keep in mind none of this is me bitching about numbers. I've made an agreement with myself to stop doing this the day I get hung up on numbers. It's about getting better.

If I gave my students comments on their essays without showing them their own writing and examples of the things they were doing well and things they could work on, they wouldn't learn.

If a coach wrote down everything an athlete was doing well or doing poorly, but waited until two weeks later to tell them their strengths and weaknesses, they wouldn't learn.

But that's what we're expected to do here. And it frustrates me, because there are many better ways to do this.

Sigh....this is speaking like a man who may now be compelled to join the damn evaluation committee...